Developers Blog

Memories of Trailing Shadows (or From Whom Gulgor Learned To Blur The Screen)

A childhood friend and myself always wondered what Dhlasim’s slow jumping hyper did. We played lots of X-Men vs. Street Fighter, a game introduced to me by him. Dhalsim, his favorite character, also became mine at first. Still, inspite of spending hundreds of pesos for tokens, we just couldn’t figure out what quarter circle forward + three kick did aside from make shadow copies of Dhalsim follow him on his way up.

Cap fails to put his shield up on a lady who destroyed cars with her legs

It wasn’t just Dhalsim’s useless jump move. All hypers in the game caused shadows to trail a character. In fact, other SF games had meter consuming moves that used this effect. Street Fighter Zero 2’s custom combos did this as well as Street Figther EX 2’s excel.

Soon, we found out Dhalsim actually was attempting the Yoga Strike, an anti-air grab move. It was pretty bad specially for an extremely fast paced game like X-Men vs. Street Fighter but was actually quite decent in something slower like Street Fighter Alpha.

Rolento’s shadow clones trailed him before it was cool.

A guide for Street Fighter Alpha 3 published by Brady Games that we got our hands on indicated that it was Rolento, a stage boss in Final Fight who pioneered the use of trailing shadows to highlight specific moves. It was after this that Super Street Fighter II Turbo introduced the super combo, powerful moves that used this same effect.

The trailing shadow effect was a pretty sweet nostalgic effect from the 16 bit era. It is no surprise the effect made its way into Slime Soldier. Here is Gulgor being all speedy and blurry with shadow copies.